Untied Threads
by Hitomishiri Eien
Summary: Midousuji has always managed on his own, using others as his "arms and legs." Ishigaki doesn't like that concept at all. -Midousuji Akira/Ishigaki Koutarou, M for sexual themes later.
1. Prolouge

They are outed by society, those cruel and unloving things. To the average person they are not even worthy of being called human; below even the most vicious of creatures rank the unloving.

How would one interact with them, after all? They feel no sympathy or empathy, displaying no emotions. And they are terrifying in that aspect, not strong. So alike to a human in form, yet so different from what is expected. We cannot understand. We do not want to understand, and so we hate them. They fuel our nightmares.

And he was okay with this. He'd long ago learned to clasp his own hands for warmth, curl into his self on those coldest of nights, draw his shoulders up to lean on. His own shoulders the only ones he trusted, the only ones he needed. On two well-weary legs he continued endlessly. The direction mattered not, where you go matters not, so long as you keep going.

You can never rest.

People go about tying the red ribbons of life with others, knotting tightly together to never let go. And when it came time to part they had to cut loose, the laceration eventually sewn back together. No matter how tight the stitches, however, one never quite forgets the slice, the mark it has left upon your life.

People came and went from his life with ease.

You never have problems with torn threads if you never knot your ribbons.


	2. Meeting

The memory's ingrained in the back of his mind; their very first meeting. He'd been unusually tall, his gait seemed to roll unsteadily from his too thin body. And when he'd gotten close enough to see the whites of his eyes, Ishigaki rather wished he'd never looked.

He'd large eyes, ridiculously so, that housed a pair of equally large and vacant irises. They reminded him of the dead fish he'd seen at the market: an unblinking gaze transfixed in space on their bony little bodies. He shuddered inwardly and his frayed edges pulled themselves inwards.

Nonetheless, he greeted the boy kindly, as he would anybody else. Everything seemed to go downhill from there: from his initial declaration to become their ace, Ishigaki's subsequent defeat, and the militarization of their team, he wondered if accepting the newcomer's challenge had been a good idea.

Midousuji appeared to hate him and he returned the sentiments as well as he could, consistently "forgetting" the honorifics, spotting him disgusted and disappointed glares, questioning him frequently.

He resented that overly theatrical laugh that seemed a mix of a drunkard fresh out the bar and a homeless man who'd lost and broken every single one of his fragile little marbles. His demeanour rude and personality intrusive, Ishigaki had more than once sat working on his bike and found Midousuji looming over his shoulder, unblinking dead eyes watching him with something cold that he could not quite figure out.

And he hated him and kept his strings held close.


	3. Practice

Practice droned on under the summer heat as the cicada's droned on in their ever-present and uninterrupted song. Heat fell from them in drops of sweat; fear and unease sinking into their stomachs cold and hard like their food after practice.

Ishigaki felt as if those eyes chased him home, their vacancies filling the shadows that creeped beneathe his bike as he raced home in the relenting summer heat. Shadows that threatened to swallow his meaning and though he'd never been afraid of the dark before, the senior found himself unable to sleep now less the lights were on.

_I'm doing this for the team, _he thought as he pulled away from the shadows behind him. _He's wrong in so many ways, but if he can get us a win I suppose we can manage. _The rest of the team thought like-wise and bit down the bile rising in their throats as his lean figure danced in front of diagrams, explaining weaknesses and faults. Mizuta flashed his rails in approval.

Formulas dancing in his head, Ishigaki raced home as usual, always trying to outpace his very own shadow. It sank into nothing like those wide, dead fish lenses and he wrapped himself tightly in his covers when he slept.


	4. Mangle

**Warning - **This chapter contains a few spoilers about the upcoming interhigh and the chapters following likely will as well.

My knowledge of what happens past day one is very limited so the spoilers are at a minimum and most of it is guess work.

* * *

There was some small bit of awe in the senior as his supposed underling swayed on the stage, face to face with the reigning kings with the same blank eyes he seemed to regard everyone with. Mischief played with his face, contorting his features and grin, filling his figure with something that resembled evil but was a poor imitation. Midousuji's eyes retained their blank, glazed appearance and as Ishigaki for the thousandth time "forgot" the honorifics and was reprimanded, he could tell nothing hid in them. No ill intent or fair wishes.

Something about the void of it terrified him, repulsed him; and yet somehow Ishigaki found himself drawn to it, wondering how deep the abyss reached and what he would find at the bottom.

He shook his head violently, turning away from the thing now across the room for him. _Stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you._

* * *

The falling sensation came as a shock to him, unreal and dreamlike. One moment he was racing forward, the next his bike slanted at too far of an angle, his center of gravity somewhere far out of his reach. _This is the end of the line for me, I suppose._ And with fear on his face and resignation in his heart he expected to crash and skid quite brutally on the asphalt, black melding with red in some gruesome banner of the wasted efforts of a teenage boy.

The righting sensation was possibly even more unreal. His jersey strained at the back, a black hole sucking him upwards and he was stable. A long, too thin arm held out a bony hand that fisted in his jersey like a fishing hook and the caster stared at him with a hint of a smile and explained that Ishigaki was still necessary for some things and couldn't be allowed to fall just yet.

Pulling out the hook, Midousuji managed to untangle and fray many strings, their free ends billowing in the wind as Ishigaki re-took his position. There was a bottom to that abyss.


	5. Plunge

**Warning - **again, kinda spoilers but at this point I'm literally going off guess work.

**Other warning**** \- **extended use of shitty metaphors.

**Note on the metaphors **\- Almost any mention of "Abyss" in this piece is referring to Midousuj's eyes in reference to the over-arching "theme" being that Midousuji locks his feelings far away and you can't see them properly in his eyes, or something like that, so they would appear to go on for forever.

* * *

Bile, acrid and scalding burned in the back of his throat. Losing always ruins your gut lining. He hadn't seen their ace in hours, but he was certainly somewhere feeling very much the same, perhaps worse. He'd taken on the task of achieving their victory and lost.

Not even double bottles of pocari could drown out the sting of acid. It pricked up his throat in a lump and behind his eyes and Ishigaki crushed the drained container.

* * *

It was dark, his steps hurried in his search for their leader. The sun had set long ago; summertime nights were always so late yet so dark. Something like the colour yellow filled his nostrils as he hunted through the tents: dead grass and plucked flowers; gold-plated metal in the distance.

His breaths were quick and the shadows were around him, but for once he was afraid of the dark not for himself, but for someone else. A glint as off glass flicked at him from a corner and at first Ishigaki thought he was staring into the eyes of some cumbersomely large stuffed animal until upon closer inspecting he found contoured bone structures instead of gentle plush.

"We should get back to the hotel, we have to leave early in the morning." Silence and the blankest gaze he'd received yet.

He scratched the back of his head and looked away, hoping maybe the tent poles held better temptation to pry the boy from his spot. But tent poles are inanimate objects incapable of thought and so he returned to the life-sized doll in front of him.

"Why are you out here anyway?" Brows furrowed. _That's a start, _Ishigaki thought as he crouched down.

"Don't be so bummed out, we did the best with what we had and to be honest we were pretty spectacular." Deeper creases that disappeared as his eyes went wider that Ishigaki had ever seen them before. Midousuji looked as he was at the verge of something, speech or sanity Ishigaki had no idea.

And finally it spilled forth. Waves and waves in a silent flood that cascaded over prominent cheeks and off his chin. The abyss bubbled and filled with an ocean and Ishigaki backed far out of its way in fear. The water pulled up to his feet and receded gently with a rushing whoosh that was a heaved breath and returned to his feet once more. He took a tentative step into the water, holding his ribbons up to keep them dry.


	6. Merge

I apologize for a shitty short chapter but I have had fics leave me hanging before and I'm going to at least try to finish it for all like 3 of you who actually read this.

* * *

As he tried to plug up the broken dam, Ishigaki kept finding the strangest things floating in the forming lake: pictures and flowers, taunting voices trailing the current like oil slicks, broken flashlights, syringes; a tombstone. The darker the objects became the harder it became to stop the flood and finally he tried the only thing he could think of left.

Carefully, like moving dried flowers, the senior wrapped his younger in his arms. Frayed edges knotting like a loose blanket over the boy seemed to do much better of a job of holding back the dam.

Raising it's wilted head, the flower set their roots down. His hand's fisting in the back of Ishigaki's jersey as the tears turned to sobs, sobs to heaving gasps, gasping breathes to a low screech crawling like nails on a chalkboard from corpse-thin throat with a life unbecoming of the emptiness it proclaimed.

Slowly, slowly, through gentle pats and soft whispers of "it's okay" the tears subsided with the only remainder shuddering hiccups and puffed eyes. Somewhere on the line the wee, thin roots slipped inside ribbon gaps. Knotted like your headphones, their threads were yet untied.


End file.
